Internet Governance Main
- Internet Shutdowns
- Content Takedown
- Surveillance
- Device Seizure
Technology-facilitated Gender-based Violence and Women’s Political Participation in India: A Position Paper
Read the full paper here.
Political participation of women is fundamental to democratic processes and promotes building of more equitable and just futures. Rapid adoption of technology has created avenues for women to access the virtual public sphere, where they may have traditionally struggled to access the physical public spaces, due to patriarchal norms and violence in the physical sphere. While technology has provided tools for political participation, information seeking, and mobilization, it has also created unsafe online spaces for women, thus often limiting their ability to actively engage online.
This essay examines the emotional and technological underpinnings of gender-based violence faced by women in politics. It further explores how gender-based violence is weaponised to diminish the political participation and influence of women in the public eye. Through real-life examples of gendered disinformation and sexist hate speech targeting women in politics in India, we identify affective patterns in the strategies deployed to adversely impact public opinion and democratic processes. We highlight the emotional triggers that play a role in exacerbating online gendered harms, particularly for women in public life. We also examine the critical role of technology and online platforms in this ecosystem – both in perpetuating and amplifying this violence as well as attempting to combat it.
We argue that it is critical to investigate and understand the affective structures in place, and the operation of patriarchal hegemony that continues to create unsafe access to public spheres, both online and offline, for women. We also advocate for understanding technology design and identifying tools that can actually aid in combating TFGBV. Further, we point to the continued need for greater accountability from platforms, to mainstream gender related harms and combat it through diversified approaches.
AI for Healthcare: Understanding Data Supply Chain and Auditability in India
This report aims to understand the prevalence and use of AI auditing practices in the healthcare sector. By mapping the data supply chain underlying AI technologies, the study aims to unpack i) how AI systems are developed and deployed to achieve healthcare outcomes and, ii) how AI audits are perceived and implemented by key stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem.
Online Censorship: Perspectives From Content Creators and Comparative Law on Section 69A of the Information Technology Act
This study presents a comparative analysis of Indian censorship law and experiences of people who have had their online content censored.
Draft Circular on Digital Lending – Transparency in Aggregation of Loan Products from Multiple Lenders
CIS is grateful for the opportunity to submit comments on the “Draft Circular on Digital Lending: Transparency in Aggregation of Loan Products from Multiple Lenders” to the Reserve Bank of India. We welcome the opportunity provided to comment on the guidelines, and we hope that the final guidelines will consider the interests of all the stakeholders to ensure that it protects the privacy and digital rights of all consumers, including marginalised and vulnerable users, while encouraging innovation and improved service delivery in the fintech ecosystem. Our comments look at two concerns addressed by the draft guidelines, i.e. reducing information asymmetry and market fairness. In addition to this we share comments around a third concern that requires additional scrutiny, i.e. data privacy and security.
Legal Advocacy Manual
The Legal Advocacy Manual summarizes the key legal and constitutional questions and jurisprudence related to laws that affect the right to freedom of expression and privacy online, including internet shutdowns, content takedown, online surveillance and device seizure.
A Guide to Navigating Your Digital Rights
The Digital Rights Guide gives practical guidance on the laws and procedures that affect internet freedoms. It covers the following topics:
The Digital Rights Guide can be viewed here.
Comments to the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024
This submission is a response by researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society India (CIS) to the draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024, published by the Committee on Digital Competition Law (CDCL), Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), (hereafter “draft DCB” or “draft Bill”).
Consultation on Gendered Information Disorder in India
On 14th and 15th March 2024, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) collaborated with Point of View (POV) to organise a consultation in Mumbai to explore the phenomenon of gendered information disorder in India, spanning various aspects from healthcare and sexuality to financial literacy, and the role of digital mediums, social media platforms and AI in exacerbating these issues.
India’s parental control directive and the need to improve stalkerware detection
We analyse a child-monitoring app being developed by the Indian government and question whether it is an effective way to enact parental controls. We highlight how such monitoring apps are often repurposed for digital stalking and play a role in intimate partner violence. We also evaluate the protection provided by antivirus tools in detecting such stalkerware apps and describe how we collected technical evidence to help improve the detection of these apps.
Reconfiguring Data Governance: Insights from India and the EU
This policy paper is the result of a workshop organised jointly by the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology and Society, Netherlands, the Centre for Communication Governance at the National Law University Delhi, India and the Centre for Internet & Society, India in January, 2023. The workshop brought together a number of academics, researchers, and industry representatives in Delhi to discuss a range of issues at the core of data governance theory and practice.
Information Disorders and their Regulation
The Indian media and digital sphere, perhaps a crude reflection of the socio-economic realities of the Indian political landscape, presents a unique and challenging setting for studying information disorders.
DoT’s order to trace server IP addresses will lead to unintended censorship
This post was reviewed and edited by Isha Suri and Nishant Shankar.
In December 2023, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued instructions to internet service providers (ISPs) to maintain and share a list of “customer owned” IP addresses that host internet services through Indian ISPs so that they can be immediately traced in case “they are required to be blocked as per orders of [the court], etc”.
For the purposes of the notification, tracing customer-owned IP addresses implies identifying the network location of a subset of web services that possess their own IP addresses, as opposed to renting them from the ISP. These web services purchase IP Transit from Indian ISPs in order to connect their servers to the internet. In such cases, it is not immediately apparent which ISP routes to a particular IP address, requiring some amount of manual tracing to locate the host and immediately cut off access to the service. The order notes that “It has been observed that many times it is time consuming to trace location of such servers specially in case the IP address of servers is customer owned and not allocated by the Licensed Internet Service Provider”.
This indicates that, not only is the DoT blocking access to web services based on their IP addresses, but is doing so often enough for manual tracing of IP addresses to be a time consuming process for them.
While our legal framework allows courts and the government to issue content takedown orders, it is well documented that blocking web services based on their IP addresses is ineffectual and disruptive. An explainer on content blocking by the Internet Society notes, “Generally, IP blocking is a poor filtering technique that is not very effective, is difficult to maintain effectively, has a high level of unintended additional blockage, and is easily evaded by publishers who move content to new servers (with new IP addresses)”. The practice of virtual hosting is very common on the internet, which entails that a single web service can span multiple IP addresses and a single IP address can be shared by hundreds, or even thousands, of web services. Blocking access to a particular IP address can cause unrelated web services to fail in subtle and unpredictable ways, leading to collateral censorship. For example, a 2022 Austrian court order to block 11 IP addresses associated with 14 websites that engaged in copyright infringement rendered thousands of unrelated websites inaccessible.
The unintended effects of IP blocking have also been observed in practice in India. In 2021, US-based OneSignal Inc. approached the Delhi High Court challenging the blockage of one of its IP addresses by ISPs in India. With OneSignal being an online marketing company, there did not appear to be any legitimate reason for it to be blocked. In response to the petition the Government said that they had already issued unblocking orders for the IP address. There have also been numerous reports by internet users of inexplicable blocking of innocuous websites hosted on content delivery networks (which are known to often share IP addresses between customers).
We urge the ISPs, government departments and courts issuing and implementing website blocking orders to refrain from utilising overly broad censorship mechanisms like IP blocking which can lead to failure of unrelated services on the internet.
Digital Delivery and Data System for Farmer Income Support
This report, jointly published by the Centre for Internet & Society and Privacy International, highlights the digital systems deployed by the government to augment farmer income. It analyses the PM-Kisan and Kalia schemes in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.
Detecting Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) Blocking
A new internet protocol makes it harder for internet service providers to censor websites. We made a technical intervention to check if censors are interfering with its deployment.
Deceptive Design in Voice Interfaces: Impact on Inclusivity, Accessibility, and Privacy
This article was commissioned by the Pranava Institute, as part of their project titled Design Beyond Deception, supported by the University of Notre Dame - IBM's Tech Ethics Lab.” The article examines the design of voice interfaces (VI) to anticipate potential deceptive design patterns in VIs. It also presents design and regulatory recommendations to mitigate these practices.
Health Data Management Policies - Differences Between the EU and India
Through this issue brief we would like to highlight the differences in approaches to health data management taken by the EU and India, and look at possible recommendations for India, in creating a privacy preserving health data management policy.
CoWIN Breach: What Makes India's Health Data an Easy Target for Bad Actors?
Recent health data policies have failed to even mention the CoWIN platform.
CensorWatch: On the Implementation of Online Censorship in India
Results from a nation-wide empirical study on web censorship
Civil Society’s second opinion on a UHI prescription
On January 13, Pallavi Bedi and Shweta Mohandas from CIS participated in an online collaboration organised by Internet Freedom Foundation for a joint submission to the Consultation Paper on Operationalising Unified Health Interface (UHI) in India released by the National Health Authority.
Comments to the proposed amendments to The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021
This note presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India, on the proposed amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (“proposed amendments”). We thank Isha Suri for her review of this submission.
Document Actions
